


that which is left (ayúdame)

by cuthbert



Category: Vampire Killer | Castlevania: Bloodlines, 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Vaguely Optimistic Ending, Canonical Character Death, Catholic Guilt, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Not Happy, Period Atypical Attitudes, Pre-Canon, Present Tense, Romantic Friendship, Self-Destruction, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Vomiting, allusions to Dracula (the actual novel by Bram Stoker), anhedonia, biphobia if you're pedantic, mentioned past polyamorous relationship, obligatory walt whitman namedrop, tags are warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 19:33:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16604183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuthbert/pseuds/cuthbert
Summary: His best friend's grief very nearly did result in John Morris setting out alone.(Underage warning is ticked there because it's not just implied, it's directly referenced. I can't seem to stop writing various iterations on "Gwen dies, then dies for real, Eric falls to pieces, John has many emotions about this", and it keeps hitting me how damn young Morris & Lecarde really were in 1917. Parenthetical is the working title, it's in Spanish because I'm just that pretentious.)





	that which is left (ayúdame)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mieldyne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mieldyne/gifts).



> Sorry, Miel, the R18 stuff is still in progress, because I keep getting self-conscious, but... I was told you might actually appreciate this, too.

“I used to be afraid of church statues,” he says, turning his head to look at John with what feels like the effort it would take to shift the world. His tongue feels heavy, like the awful taste in his mouth and the pounding inside his skull have remade it in lead. (There's an idea. Votives, votives for grief. A series of them, something like Mexican ofrendas….) “I thought they'd look at me if I looked at them. I was afraid they'd come to life and tell everyone just what kind of sinner I was.”

When he prays he still pictures Christ as he saw him in the Cathedral of Segovia - beautiful and caught up in agony forever. It was _that_ statue that he first _noticed_ in the way one _notices_ other men, and surely that was the most mortal version of the sin that damned both of his father's favorite Irishmen. He was nine years old and suddenly overcome with an urge to free that tortured form from the Cross, to bandage His wounds and kiss Him back to health as maidens did knights in old stories. Whitman wrote a poem where he recognized Jesus as one of his kind, one of _their_ kind, but it is not enough to have that. It has been sixteen years and he still cannot let go of the shame that followed that first sweep of desire.

John is, as he so often has these past few days, looking at him with an expression more of pained and weary sadness than pity. That pity is still part of it no longer irritates Eric, it simply is what it is, as much a part of reality as the turning between day and night. “Yeah… yeah, I remember,” John says. “You need anything? Water, maybe?”

Eric considers it for a long moment, letting his eyes flutter closed. There is a heavy feeling at the base of his throat, a twisting below it. “I think - the basin, Jojo, please, I'm going to be sick….”

That childhood nickname slipped out by accident, but John doesn't seem to have noticed it. He's an efficient nurse, quick to cross the room and return, just as quick to steady Eric when the room seems to spin after he's raised himself up to sit at the edge of the bed. The broth from earlier doesn’t seem to have changed much from the time it spent in his stomach, and that thought is disgusting enough to keep him retching well after there is nothing left to expel.

He makes a weak little noise once the spasms subside, and collapses sideways against John with more force than he’d intended. “I hate this,” he says, his voice thin. John takes the basin from his lap and sets it down on the chair he’d been sitting in, then, when he turns back, shifts so that he can fit his arms around Eric and gently pull him closer. It’s not something he’d expected, or even dared hope for, this. He knows John to be sentimental, he remembers the way they “practiced” as boys, but that was years ago, an old game, something he ought to have forgotten.

He cannot let himself remember Paris. He cannot let himself think of Gwendolyn’s eyes sparkling as she asked if they were going to _keep_ this half-civilized Texan, if only because she wanted to, if only because she wanted to see the two of them together, if it were only that she wanted to take him herself, that she wanted to see both of them happy, both in her bed. He cannot bear the memory of sleeping tangled between the two of them, cannot bear the weight of that beautiful summer four years gone.

“That makes two of us,” John says, finally, pulling him out of the past. His voice is a promise-laden low rumble, like distant thunder on a dry, hot day. He tenses up for a moment, seemingly hesitating, and then he relaxes again, and suddenly he’s leaned his head against Eric’s own, and then he turns it and gently kisses the spot where that movement left his mouth. There’s nothing else that soft little pressure could have been. “If I’m… God, Eric, it’s _killing_ me seeing you like this. I’m sorry if I shouldn’t’ve done that, but I cain’t - I _can’t_ stand seeing you so broken up.”

His mouth tastes like sour iron and his head aches. This is neither the time nor place for a discussion of what they could have done, of what they once did, of what they might yet do. He feels as though the pain in his head might carry him right out of his body, away from all of this. “It’s all right,” he says, softly, “nothing else is, but this… I miss her so _much_ , Jojo, and yet you’re right here. You’re here. She’s dead, Gwen’s _dead_ , and you’re here.”

“Yeah,” John says softly. “I’m right here. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”   

_No,_ he thinks, drowsy, barely conscious. _No, Jojo’s not going anywhere without me, he’s not allowed..._ He is solid, and warm, and it is there in his arms that Eric is finally able to find sleep, relaxing back against him with a soft sigh.

\---

It takes the kind of delicate effort most men don’t think him capable of, but John does manage to settle Eric back into bed without waking him. It’s a close call, a few times. He stirs, and makes little sad sounds, and nuzzles against him. It’s the sweetest and most awful thing he’s ever seen, John thinks.

He steps out into the hallway from Eric’s suite of rooms with the basin of vomit held away from him. Almost like magic a maid appears, stifles a grimace behind a smile, and takes it from him. That’s one problem solved - at least the WC’s just down the hall, and that solves another, and he manages to return before Eric could wake and find him gone.

Unfortunately he’s no longer alone in the room. Xavier Lecarde sits at his son’s bedside, head bowed over a rosary, praying so quietly that it seems he’s doing nothing but moving his lips. For the first time John can remember, the man looks _old_. He is, of course. He was fifty-three in 1897, his own father had called him Old Man. Eric is the first of several children born from a very late second marriage to a scandalously young woman. Still, even at seventy-three, Xavier has never seemed weighted down by age, not until now.

He waits until the prayer he cannot hear is ended, until his friend’s father has crossed himself, and as the man looks up John clears his throat. “Professor Lecarde, I… I swear I only stepped out for a minute, I didn’t leave him here.”

Xavier nods, slowly. “I do not believe you would, John.” He looks as though he, too, hasn’t slept properly since Gwendolyn’s death. He looks older than God. He can’t be dying, surely. He can’t be dying, if he dies then Eric will just _snap_. He needs his father, he needs all the support he can get.

John has read the accounts everyone left of what had been Lucy Westenra, more than once. Stoker’s novelization of all that year’s unpleasantness, too. He’s read them far more than once, and well enough that he can see the “fair-haired child” Eric was when he was taken in the way his face looks as he sleeps. From the look on Xavier’s face, he isn’t the only one. John has only a handful of memories of that horrible year. When he tries to remember _that night_ for himself, all he can recall is a single moment: Eric standing in front of him, arms outspread, crying out at what used to be Miss Lucy to go away, to leave them alone.

Three weeks ago, they’d buried Gwendolyn, more accurately lain her coffin in the Lecarde family tomb beside Eric’s mother, and that was when this illness had seized him. It was grief. He seemed slow in his movements, and constantly hesitant, only halfway able to think past the next moment. He had insisted that he was, at least, still able to fight, when the first reports filtered in of attacks on young men. Battle was moment-to-moment, after all, and with a partner at his side to handle strategy he could manage well enough by simply reacting and following shouted warnings.

He’d smiled, then, and John had believed in that smile.

Two weeks ago, Eric had found a reserve of strength John suspected he didn’t know he’d possessed until that moment. He stood between John and a monster in woman’s guise again, and this time struck her down. They’d done as the Professor had done to Lucy with Doc Seward’s help, once they’d carried her back to the tomb - she seemed true-dead, but young vampires didn’t dissipate as their elders would. It was impossible to be certain that she wouldn’t rise again, if certain monstrous measures were not taken. It had worsened Eric’s condition to mutilate her, even for a holy purpose.

It had left him like this, barely able to eat or sleep.

One week ago he took to his bed, and since he’s only risen from it with help, and that only because his dignity is apparently still alive enough to draw the line not just _at_ but _well ahead of_ using a bedpan. He looks like a ghost, now, and like a ghost he doesn’t talk very much. That talk of church statues was the first time he’d said anything since the previous afternoon; between those two moments he’d simply lain silent, staring at the air between the posts at the foot of his bed. He’s lost more weight in less than a month than John would have thought possible. He is gaunt, now, with bruiselike circles below his eyes; when the light of sunset flows across him from the windows, it’s nearly enough to make him look like a particularly well-tortured cross-mounted Jesus.

Since they were children, Eric has been his protector. John knows this as well as he knows both their names. Eric had promised his father that he would protect him, as Quincy lay dying, and now he’s the one who needs protecting. John can only hope he’s worthy of the task, and it’s this which sits heavy on his mind when Eric stirs, his hands plucking at the bedcovers like it’s said those of one about to die will do. He’s swift to cross the room, then, and finds himself standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed, not wanting to crowd Xavier.

Eric’s eyelashes flutter, and his head lolls to the right, looking where John had been sitting and not finding him. “Papá?” he asks, voice small and frail in a way it hasn’t yet been in John’s earshot, and then he looks alarmed, frantic, and pushes himself up to rest on his elbows, looking around the room and finally relaxing when he realizes John is there at the foot of his bed. He relaxes enough, in fact, that he collapses untidily back against his pillow. “I thought… I… shit, I don’t know what I thought....” He’s lapsed back into his native tongue again, but it’s not exactly a _foreign_ language to John at this point.

“Hey, I said I wasn’t leaving you,” he says, switching away from English himself, and finally walks around to join Xavier at the side of the bed.

He watches as the man lays a hand on his son’s head, watches as Eric leans kittenlike into the touch, looking at his father with a beseeching expression that would look at home on one of those statues he used to fear. “Neither of us wishes to leave you,” Xavier says, stroking his son’s tangled hair, and it’s as though John can see back through to their childhood. Eric had been seized by nightmares for _years,_ for long enough that John felt guilty at times that he wasn’t, and he’d been awakened by that same low voice speaking quiet reassurances in Spanish more times than he could count. “Please don’t leave us, my son. She would not want you to join her so soon.”

Eric’s eyes slip closed at that, agony etching itself across his face. John seizes one of his hands, then kneels and takes the other, too. Xavier’s own eyes close, but only for a moment, only long enough to banish what may have been tears. Looking at him is like seeing Eric far in the future, sometimes; the man had been a legendary beauty in his own youth, and even now with a neatly-clipped white beard and fully silvered-over hair there are traces of that left to him. His eyes are a shocking azure, even deeper than his son’s own, and that gaze is trained on John now. He’s long wondered if Xavier knew what it was they were practicing besides combat on those summer afternoons that had seemed to last forever, almost a decade ago; the exhausted fondness in those astonishing eyes seems to say that yes, he always did, and never disapproved enough to stop them.

John doesn’t look away, even as he speaks. “I know it hurts, but… _you_ know he’s right. Please, Eric. You’ve protected me for so long, let me have a turn. Let me protect you for a change. Just… please. Please don’t die on me.” He squeezes his hands, and is heartened by the strength with which Eric squeezes back, even as it takes a few seconds of blinking for his eyes to reopen and focus.

“I am not dying, John. I am dizzy, and I am sick more often than I can keep food down, and I desperately need to bathe,” Eric says, and swallows hard as though to somehow underline the second point. “But you are right, both of you. Papá, I didn’t mean to make you worry, but I… I can’t yet say I want to live, but... I do not want to die.” His voice is papery and dry, and the little laugh that escapes him sounds like wind through dead leaves. “You’re right. You’re right, she’d be so angry with me….”

They cannot set out to avenge Gwendolyn, not yet. Eric will need to regain the strength he has lost, and John does not want to drag a man into battle who still can’t say he wants to stay alive. But he did say that he doesn’t want to die, and that’s a start. He’s turned the corner. They’ll get through this, like every other horror they’ve lived through. They will. They have to.

**Author's Note:**

> If that "his father's favorite Irishmen" is too opaque an allusion: that means Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. There's a surprising amount of evidence to support the idea that Stoker was a self-hating bisexual who grew to be OSC-level vitriolic towards the end of his life directly because he saw what homophobia did to Wilde.
> 
> You can blame Miel Dyne for "that childhood nickname", I think she was the first to have Eric call John that (at least on the English side of fandom) and I thought it was cute. She's not a big angst fan from what I recall so I initially wasn't planning on gifting this at her, but it's her fault entirely that you've got my rotten-girl self camped out in the tag here! c;


End file.
